Monsoon Wedding - Mira Nair

It’s monsoon season in Delhi when the extended Verma family reunites from around the world to celebrate the arranged marriage of one of their daughters. And this vibrant wedding turned out to be one that the world of cinema eagerly watched and joyously celebrated. After the universal success of Salaam Bombay and Kamasutra: A Tale of Love, Mira Nair came up with the glamorous Monsoon Wedding and struck a chord with Indian and Western audiences alike. A small- big movie, as she likes to call it, the film is a portrayal of the Delhi dot come society – a society which is at the brink of getting global. “Today, Delhi is a strange 'globalized' world where tradition butts heads with modernity at every turn. Gucci and Prada exist side by side with power cuts and traffic jams, and the spoken language is colorful and inventive, crisscrossing easily between English, Hindi, and Punjabi," the director was quoted saying about the making of this international blockbuster. Made at a time in which the modern era set in to make itself comfortable on the shaky seat of traditional Indian ideals, Monsoon Wedding was watched as a spectacle of a tech-driven culture clashed society, and certainly a whole lot more!

The film shows four days and nights leading to an upper-middle class Punjabi Wedding with five interweaving stories; Weary of her relationship with her unpromising boyfriend/ TV Host, Aditi the bride-to-be has consented to an arranged marriage with Hemant (Parvin Dabas) a handsome engineer from Houston. The wedding ofcourse is more to seek her emotional riddance from her ex-boyfriend. But old passions keep visiting – She frequently slips off to see her hopeless lover with sweltering feelings only days before the nuptials, when relatives are crowding and wedding tents are going up.

Her father Lalit (Naseerudin Shah) is the liable man who does everything to make sure the big day meets all those sensational wedding requirements. He’s understandably saddled and ever displeased with his corny wedding contractor P.K (Vijay Raaz). Irritable but good-natured Lalit characterizes the typically pressured father of an Indian bride- to-be. His wife Pimmi (Lillete Dubey) is an up-to-the-minute woman who walks around frantically, with curling rollers perched over her hair almost all the time. A good wife to Lalit, she gives him the angry face when Lalit upsets their teenage son Varun (who fusses and strolls about in a cute but girly manner) and gives him the comforting hug in a moment of emotional turmoil.

And then, just as every Indian wedding turns out to be more than just the sacred unison of the blessed bride and groom, Monsoon Wedding too shows a roll of other love stories taking place on the side. Ayesha the hot, fashionable relative and Rahul (Randeep Hooda) the Sydney returned cousin have a fling full of teenage lust and romance. P.K the event planner too finds his soulmate in Alice the household’s sweet faced maid. (Watch out for his romance, it’s the most lyrical of them all.) And Ria (played intensely by Shefali Shetty), the unmarried writer cousin of the bride, makes a drastic revelation in the end, one that chills the wedding atmosphere and shakes the family’s foundation. But all is well when the monsoon rain comes pouring. The nuptials are done with; there’s song, dance, peace and celebration.

Mira Nair referred to her movie as “A love song to my home city” (Delhi), and Monsoon Wedding is just that. She captures the nerve of modern Delhi and its changing Indian morals in colorful delight. The mix up of conventional culture with modern age technology, the hodgepodge of present day language (showing how Hindi, Punjabi and English can all be used in one sentence), the close familial ties, the Bollywood dances, the monsoon slush, the proximity of upper and lower classes – All of it comes to us as a charming slice of life. The interwoven stories take place without being interruptive, alongside the ongoing wedding preparations, the joyful belly-laughs, the threatening insecurities, the sad sniffling, sobbing and all those nitty-gritties that lug on a wedding. Be it Pimmi asking her teenaged son the kind of questions that make him flush and smile; or aunties who shake their hips and flamboyantly dance to loud Bollywood numbers, or P.K chewing marigolds in thoughtful delight; it all complies with the fitting subtitle that appears as an after thought at the end of the film – “We are like that only”, an Indian styled translation of the phrase, “That’s the way we are baby!”

A typical instance of “The Big Fat Indian Wedding” this film is a mini epic. Disorder and chaos looms through the movie right from the start, but in an organized madness executed to show the natural confusion and noisiness that goes into an Indian wedding. The movie stars 68 actors (with 90% of the starcast being women) and was shot with a hand held camera (this was the first feature film to use the A-minima, a palm sized camera from Aaton) in 30 short days. Monsoon Wedding was made in a spirit of experimentation. Mira Nair aspired to make a film that didn’t involve millions of rupees, special effects and other garnishes that are needed for fiction films. She was inspired by the Dogma Movement for this one – a film movement that was started in Denmark, one with little or no emphasis on lights, special effects and film manipulation, and relied solely on the essence of the drama and the actor to tell a simple story spectacularly. So Monsoon Wedding, a marvelous product of this vision, was made without any thought of rewards – the film’s props, the furniture, the saris, the jewellery and paintings – all was taken from Nair's own family. Two-thirds of the movie was shot in a rich farm house in the outskirts of Delhi, and the rest was shot in those commonplace restaurants and rainy roads that are seen in the film. But the director’s shoestring budget paid off in millions and broke all box office records. Her “realistic version of Hum Aapke Hain Kaun” (Bollywood’s iconic wedding story) won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and was the highest box office grosser amongst NRI filmmakers, until the release of Gurinder Chadha's Bend it like Beckham and again, her own much acclaimed film The Namesake.

The film is all that celebrations are made out of. The ritzy wedding jewellery, the jangling music, the quiet kisses, the bright faces, the real stories, together with all its strength and courage. It’s funny, touching, true and forceful. Your perfect afternoon movie if you haven’t watched it already, make sure you witness this wedding!

Watch this to get a glimpse of what the fuss is all about: